By Ysabel Yates
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Comic books were as popular with kids and teens in the 1950s as TV and social media is today. Although many parents couldn’t stand them, the team inside GE’s communication department took a second look. Since comics often featured outlandish spacecraft and superheroes, the GE PR whizzes thought they could use comics to explain some of the underlying science and get kids hooked on technology, engineering and mathematics, a program we now call STEM.
GE’s most recent stab at STEM substitutes comics with the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Above: The cover of a GE comic printed in Spanish and covering transistors. Image credit: Museum on Innovation and Science in Schenectady Top: Fallonventors Sahar Khashayar, Brooke Boyer, and Sean Violette. Image credit: NBC
The mediums might be different, but the message is the same. “In the public relations field, although we were all aware of the adult fear that comic books were producing a crop of juvenile delinquents, we couldn’t escape the conclusion that the medium had attractive possibilities for mass communications,“ said a 1953 story about the GE comics program published in General Electric Review, an in-house newspaper.
GE started printing comics, some illustrated by George “Inky” Roussos of Batman fame, “on mammoth presses of newsprint stock in quantities of 500,000 to 3,000,000.” The books were both in English and in Spanish and included titles Adventures in Jet Power, Adventures inside the Atom, Adventures in Electricity and many others. One issue even described the method used to make artificial diamonds (see below). Many well-preserved issues are still available online.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
A fun job. GE had a strict approval process in place for its comics. According to the GE Review, the “drawings were shown to several vice presidents and managers” before publication. Image credit: Museum on Innovation and Science in Schenectady
GE has now injected TV into the “adventures,” but the goal is the same: engagement. The company partnered with NBC to create a segment called Fallonventions for the Tonight Show designed to inspire young minds to pursue STEM. (They don’t have to stay up late. The video is available on YouTube.)
The show recently invited three young inventors to present their prototypes. They brought a wildfire warning system controlled by an Arduino processor, a Velcro belt that attaches a tissue box to the body called “Tissue Time 3000,” and a paper airplane launcher.
The tissue box invention demonstrated that great ideas are often born from adversity: its 7-year-old inventor, Brooke Boyer, says she came up with it after her parents wouldn’t let her stay up on New Years Eve, and she “cried, and then they let me.”
As Florence Nightingale once said: “If there were none discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.”
If you know kids whose minds are crackling with hot ideas, they can be the next Fallonventors.Simply create a short video featuring the inventor (ages 13+) and their invention, and upload it to YouTube using the hashtag #MyFallonvention in the title. Go here for more details.